Fast & Furious 6

Much of what we get from Hollywood these days are stupid movies made by smart people for stupid audiences - but make no mistake, "Fast & Furious 6" is not one of those movies.

"Fast & Furious 6" is something else, something more honorable: a stupid movie made by smart people for smart audiences in the mood for something stupid but glorious, stupid but well made, stupid but knowing it. We're talking about a movie with no more than eight brain cells to rub together, but in this case that's about eight more than it needs. There's a place in cinema for pictures like this - a place in human life. Even Terrence Malick would go crazy watching Terrence Malick movies every night.

In place of intelligence, "Fast & Furious 6" has movement, both in story and in action. It has big, basic emotions. And it has Vin Diesel, who is a screenwriter's best friend. Put Diesel in close-up, have him gaze off to the side of the camera with a look of vaguely amused insolence, and have him growl anything, absolutely anything, in that bass voice of his: "Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow." The whole audience will be thinking, "Wow. You just hear that? He means business."

This is the beauty of Diesel as an actor. Do you think you're the only one who knows that half the lines they write for him are ridiculous? He knows it, too, but he takes it, and he sells it, and we end up buying it.

In this latest installment, an international terrorist is planning to shut down a major western city and cause the death of millions. Hey, but don't worry, there's a single FBI agent on the case - yes, just one guy - a muscleman named Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson). Do you feel safe yet? No, really, it's fine, because Hobbs has devised a brilliant means of saving the world. He is going to find Dominic (Diesel), the great street racer and international thief, and Dominic and his crew of high-spirited fast drivers are going to take out those terrorists.

Of course, the crew has to be reassembled. Since their last job, the cracking of a casino, they have all dispersed to the glamour spots of the earth. But they come together because, well, this time it's personal. Remember Letty, the love of Dominic's life, who blew up in an earlier installment of the series? It turns out she's alive and writhing under the thumb of the lead terrorist. And so, in one completely far-fetched plot device, Dominic gets a reason to live, and the series gets back one of its best assets, Michelle Rodriguez - the only actress in America whose voice is even lower than Diesel's.

The rest of "Fast & Furious 6" consists of car chases through the streets of London, street races through traffic, terror disruptions and the occasional shoot-out. Some of the action is so over the top and so hard to believe that audiences will laugh out loud, even as they're enjoying it. But it's all fun - fun sustained over a whole 130 minutes, which is an achievement.

In the end, the key to this movie's success, and to the success of the best films in this series, isn't to do with execution, with sequences effectively put together. The real key is the human element. The people at the center of the movie - not just Diesel and Rodriguez, but Paul Walker as his brother-in-law, and some of the ancillary characters, too - are appealing. It doesn't matter that these are improbable characters who could never exist. The movie makes us believe that, if they did exist, they'd care about each other.

That's what makes the alchemy of this series hard to duplicate and why I'd happily sit down tonight to watch "Fast & Furious 7," already set for release in 2014.